With 10 minutes to go and Stamford Bridge crackling with defiance, Arsenal’s Noni Madueke had a fleeting glimpse of something that looked like a gap on the edge of Chelsea’s penalty area. It was closing even as he darted for it. Marc Cucurella appeared from one side, Enzo Fernández from the other. The ball was lost, the moment gone, the stalemate maintained.
What followed, though, spoke volumes. Madueke was sprawled on the ground: not actively claiming a foul, by any means, but delaying long enough to ensure referee Anthony Taylor at least had to think about it. Taylor ignored him. Fernández and Cucurella did not. Both turned to their former teammate, goading and snarling, indicating that they were very much of the view that he might like both to get up and not get past them again.
It was, in many ways, that sort of afternoon. The problem with describing a draw is that it is very difficult to find a form of words that does not feel in some way loaded. Did Chelsea hold Arsenal? Did Arsenal hold Chelsea? Those are, after all, not quite the same thing. Did Arsenal have to settle for a point, or did Chelsea?
There are some cases, of course, in which it is easy to distinguish which team clung on and which one was held back. This was, unfortunately, not one of them. Even after Moisés Caicedo’s first half red card – a case study in how refereeing has been changed by the introduction of the video assistant referee – it was too breathless, too choleric, too fiery for either team to assert anything resembling control.
On the outside, this had been presented as a sort of last stand for any hope of an actual title race this season, a final obstacle standing between Arsenal and a procession between now and May. That was, in all likelihood, something of an exaggeration: Arsenal went into the weekend six points clear, and it is November. It was curious, then, that both teams seemed to have bought into the hype.
The ongoing psychological referendum on Arsenal’s capability of winning a first Premier League title for more than two decades means much of the focus will fall on what this result means for, and what it says about, Mikel Arteta’s team.
In some lights, it will be seen as a creditable point from one of Arsenal’s most difficult away trips this season, one which leaves them five points clear at the top of the table ahead of a variety of deeply inconsistent rivals, having lost just a single game.
In others, it will be interpreted as further proof of the caution which has long since been presented as their fatal flaw. Whether Arteta made attacking substitutions, whether his team created chances, whether Chelsea away is, in fact, quite a difficult game: it will all be rendered secondary to the raw fact that they played for more than an hour against 10 men and did not win. There will be plenty who wish to see in that overwhelming evidence that Arsenal lack some sort of killer instinct.
In truth, though, this game was far more illustrative of the nature of the home side. Chelsea have, for much of the past three years, been presented as a maelstrom of endless transfers and managerial churn and vaguely unhinged ambition.
The club’s model – or at least the model preferred by the club’s ownership – seems to run contrary to at least one of football’s abiding principles, which is that teams need time to settle, develop and to coalesce into something that is more than the sum of their parts. It is generally considered impossible to nurture that sort of identity, of esprit de corps, of unified purpose if every summer brings a welter of new players and quite often a new coach.
There have been times, certainly, when it has been possible to wonder if that is at least part of the reason so many Chelsea fans have been reluctant to commit any emotional energy to the concept of Enzo Maresca. His football has been less than absorbing at times. His team has shown precious little consistency in either personnel or performance. And besides, at the back of the mind is the suspicion that he probably won’t be around for very long anyway.
Cucurella and Fernández, though, embodied a display against the champions elect which suggested that – despite it all – something is stirring in west London, taking shape and gathering force.
Caicedo might have taken it too far, something that has become a recurring issue for Chelsea this season: the Ecuadorian was the recipient of Chelsea’s sixth red card of the season. But the intensity with which Maresca’s team played, the pugnacity, the conviction not only gathers points, it wins over fans, injects belief, builds seasons.
Arsenal already have that trait in abundance, of course. That is why they are top of the Premier League, why they have been anointed champions in waiting. For Chelsea, though, it is still something relatively fresh, relatively new. Both teams left Stamford Bridge with the same reward. But Chelsea took far more from the experience than Arsenal.
Photograph by Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Offside via Getty